Our weather blog brings you expert perspective on the latest weather news. Our weather experts share the inside scoop with blog entries from the studio and from the field. Check out the latest weather news and storm coverage in our most recent blog entries.

Monday, February 10

After several inches of lake fluff up near Lake Ontario this afternoon through Tuesday, with little to none south of the Thruway, & 1 to 3 or 4" for the corridor from the Thruway to Rt. 104. High pressure pictured above will squash out any lingering flakes Tuesday afternoon & set us up for a clear, frigid night Tuesday night into early Wednesday. Lows should dip to within a few degrees of 0 early Wednesday, before rising into the 20s during the afternoon under abundant sunshine.

On Thursday, a developing Nor'easter giving parts of the south a dicey midweek period, will likely miss us to the east, but a clipper will likely provide a little Valentine's Day wet snow for us on Friday into Friday night. Temperatures will moderate nicely into the 30s for Thursday & Friday, before we drop back into the 20s for the weekend. I don't believe it will be a big deal Friday into Friday night, but some minor accumulations I would say are definitely a possibility with some lake snow, wind & colder temps to follow later Friday night into Saturday. It should stay cold through early next week, but then we MAY see a more significant warm up, at least temporarily speaking, for the middle to end of next week. We'll see...

Have a great start to your week everyone!

Posted by
News 8 Weather

61 comments:

As I have said it is over and News 8 is in agreement. The storm is well east of us and we will be watchers plus the warm-up I have been saying coming next week. Thanks for tracking with me including CCCC.

I'm not about to rule out the possibility of the western fringe giving us a moderate snowfall if the typical short range NW shift can work its magic, but the odds of a direct hit and heavy snow are almost nil at this point. For now I still believe there is the chance for some sort of impact, especially since the northern stream energy hasn't been sampled yet and appears to be trending slower on the models. The coastal system has also been ticking westward, but of course all of this could very well be a case of too little too late. At this point the LIKELY outcome is a complete miss, but it is still not definite. The 00z model runs tonight will either keep the dream alive, or be the clincher for a whiff.

Thanks Scott been saying this is dead for us for 2 days and talking about a warm-up next week. No not 50s or 60s but a warm-up relative to what we have had. But I get butchered bc I do not put fancy models or data on the site. Just going to keep calling them as I see them. Plus my new name!

If you're going to call it as you see it, then post what you see and/or where you see it so that others may see it as well. Whether it's models or forecaster discussions, it really doesn't matter. Don't just throw something out there without substantiating it. That's why you were getting butchered. And if you were the Anon calling for spring to begin in earnest during the middle of February...well that might be why as well.

Are you serious? We can not win? We just got hammered with over a foot of snow less than a week ago. Second time this season. Some people on this blog will complain unless we are getting pounded with snow every day.

What I wouldn't give to go back and experience the winter of 1977-1978. Three snowstorms producing over 10 inches of snow, two of them well over a foot. Very few people mention this, but Rochester got almost as much snow from the infamous New England Blizzard of 1978 as Boston did. The airport measured 25 inches over a two day span. Here is a map of totals from NCDC:

Well, I'm glad you'd go back in time for that winter. I was in my final year at RIT, tooling around in my '67 Ford Falcon. Not exactly built for the extremes. Got stuck twice. Not good memories. That and snow depths never give me warm fuzzies.Didn't we have an approx. 24" blizzard in '99, followed by 19" a couple days later? Maybe it's a false memory.

Not false at all, we did indeed have two storms within a few days of each other with those totals. I'd love to go back and experience those too, especially since I didn't move out to this area until 2009. I definitely don't envy having to drive through 2+ feet of snow in a '67 Ford Falcon though lol.

When is this lake effect going to start. Last night they did not call for it and I picked up 6 inches of fluff and I am well south of 104 in Gananda. Now the have warnings out and not a flake is flying and the band over the lake is not shifting south.

What is interesting to me is that we have only had 71 inches of snow so far and with nothing on the horizon and a thaw next week, will we hit 100"? It has been a cold winter but not particularly snowy. We are just a few inches above average in snowfall. I have seen much snowier and stormier winters than this.

I think we stand a good chance of that. The horizon isn't completely clear...we still have some lake effect to get through tonight and potentially a weak system at the end of the week that could bring a light to moderate snowfall to the region. We are currently 7.3 inches above average on snowfall for this date. There is little doubt the gap will begin to close through the course of next week, perhaps after expanding a little bit. But what follows is historically one of our stormiest time frames, and there is mounting talk of a return to a colder and more active pattern by then. John did say earlier that next week's warmup looks temporary, and given the progression of the MJO over the next few weeks, the look of the Euro weekly and the eventual manifestation of the polar stratospheric warming I'm inclined to agree with him, as well as the outlooks for a colder and active pattern for the end of February into early March. The NAO looks like it wants to slowly crawl towards neutral as well, with pretty good agreement among the GFS ensemble members, lending further credence to this idea. There is also deep troughing over east Asia which should translate to a trough over North America by the final week of the month.

Yes I believe 100"+ is a very high probability. Just look at where we are now and how much we typically get from this point till the end of winter? In an average year we get roughly another 25"-30" from this day forward. Sans January we have been running ahead of normal. At the end of December I predicted 115". That gets to be more of a reach as time passes, but one big storm in the next 4-5 weeks and we're there easily.

Reminiscing about snowstorms brings me back to my high school days in 1966. We had a 20 inch snowstorm, followed a week later by a 34 inch blizzard, which basically shut the city down for a week. The plows were pulled off of many roads because they couldn't keep up or were stuck. I remember the snow being at least knew deep in the street walking to the corner grocery store for milk. Winds were 35-45 MPH, gusting to 60. Visibility was near zero for days. Oswego ended up with 103 inches and Syracuse 43 inches. We've had some big storms since, but I'll never forget the 1966 blizzard.

What happened to all that lake effect we were supposed to get last night.??? My area was suppose to get 6-12 and I picked up a half inch. We are so bad at predicting lake effect. The other day I was supposed to get maybe 1-2 and I picked up 6. The end of the world is coming to Atlanta again with a little snow.

Get ready for an early spring like last year. End of next week 50s or above. 2 for 2 no big storm said three days before CCCC admitted it and a warm-up next week been saying that too. Right on for me but not legit unless data stated ha ha.

Man, there is a lot of complaining on here! This has been a ridiculously cold winter, and higher than average snow amounts (that don't because it's so cold)...all the things you all complained we didn't get last year. But that's not good enough either, you want major snowstorms! News flash......move!! They are not common here, and never have been!!

All I know is that I'm looking out the window and we have about 18 inches in our yard, and it's too cold for the kids to play in it. I'm ready for spring!! Come back sun. Come back warmth!

So I didn't receive nothing last night after all...managed to count 3 or 4 flakes per square foot on car windshields this morning. Seems the snow remained confined almost entirely to areas near the lake. Still looks like next week's warmup will be strictly temporary. It also doesn't look like a peaceful warmup...the Euro weekly and the outlook from the CPC both indicate unsettled weather for next week amidst the above average temperature anomalies.

This storm doesn't really look to produce much more snow than what was produced with last week's storm. The biggest difference will be with the amount of wind...many places from eastern PA up through the Canadian Maritimes should see blizzard conditions with such a wrapped up low. I'm not sure we'll get another opportunity at a big storm either, because there is literally no way to be completely sure. One thing I am sure of is that we have plenty of time remaining for potential opportunities. St Paddy's Day is the unofficial cutoff date for big winter storms in WNY.

Our region gets fringed by the coastal storm on the latest Euro model run. This is why I didn't want to give up on the possibility of fringe snowfall from the system, and now the Euro appears to be leading the way with westward ticks over time along with a slowly expanding precip shield. The more easterly American models seem to be playing catch-up to the westerly foreign models at the moment. That said, the Euro is currently the only model to show any precipitation this far west as far as I know.

Strike that last bit...the GGEM also throws some light snow back our way, with a very brief period of moderate snow as the system pulls away. This is based off of simulated radar so it isn't worth much right now.

The hail mary is in the air and Calvin Johnson is triple covered, but he's fighting hard for space...

Lol that's definitely not happening. But if the current trend holds we may be in line for an inch or two. This has the look of a storm that centers the heaviest snow along a Scranton, PA to Portland, ME line.

It actually does phase later on once the coastal is up near Atlantic Canada, but I'm guessing the distance between the two systems combined with their similar strong intensity leads to ridging (and therefore drying) between them until that point. I believe the same thing happened last year with the monster storm in early February, but since the northern stream low was weaker, more southerly and closer to the coastal at the onset the temporary ridging was further east and less pronounced, and the two systems phased sooner. That ridging could be why CNY saw lesser snow amounts than places both east and west. This is all just educated guessing on my part though, so take it for what it's worth.

The 18z GFS says wagons west. Again. It's been correcting towards the foreign models (which have been ticking slightly west themselves) since yesterday morning. I want to reiterate that we are completely out of the running for a significant snowfall, and 95% out of the running for a moderate one, but a 1-2 inch snowfall from the edge of the precip shield looks like a plausible outcome.

Now if I wanted to do some big league cherrypicking, I would ride the 18z RGEM. It tracks the low through the coastal plain, and the upstream "kicker" becomes more like a "puller" instead and drags the coastal towards the NW. We end up with what looks like a moderate snowfall:

But within 48 hours and with the critical players already fully sampled? Highly unlikely IMO. I do think we'll see additional small movements of the track with time, perhaps even a bit further west, but not enough to warrant substantial snowfall amounts in our region.

The only thing I heard Scott say tonight was FIFTY. There IS hope this agony is going to end. BTW great news about "the miss". I'm sure most (99%) of the folks in the path of that monster would rather not be.

"...MEDIUM RANGE MODEL GUIDANCE CONTINUES TO POINT TOWARDS THE POTENTIAL OF A SIGNIFICANT PATTERN CHANGE LATER NEXT WEEK. THE MEAN LONGWAVE TROUGH IS FORECAST TO CONSOLIDATE OVER ALASKA AND THE WEST COAST OF CANADA...WHICH WOULD ALLOW PACIFIC AIR TO FLOOD THE NATION FROM WEST TO EAST. THIS MAY BRING A THAW TO THE REGION BY LATER NEXT WEEK WITH ABOVE AVERAGE TEMPERATURES FOR AT LEAST A FEW DAYS...AND MAYBE LONGER. THE ECMWF KEEPS A STRONGER TROUGH IN SOUTHEAST CANADA THROUGH LATE NEXT WEEK...WHICH WOULD INCREASE THE LIKELIHOOD OF WEAK BACKDOOR FRONTS WHICH WOULD CUT OFF THE WARM AIR BEFORE IT REACHES THIS FAR EAST. THIS WILL NEED TO BE MONITORED AS IT MAY KEEP MOST OF THE WARM AIR LOCKED JUST TO OUR WEST FOR AT LEAST A PORTION OF THIS PATTERN CHANGE."

So it looks like a 2 to 4, maybe 5 day warmup at this point, part of which may be spoiled by backdoor cold fronts. Quite unusual to be reading about those in mid February, as they are typically an element of early spring not late winter. Either way, the warmup will be strictly temporary.